Unpacking Ethnic Preferences

Abstract

Much of the recent scholarship about ethnicity in comparative politics has focused on why ethnicity becomes a salient cleavage. Yet opinions still diverge as to how ethnicity matters. This article tests three hypotheses relevant to this question. Building on recent arguments, it first hypothesizes that voters take the ethnicity of parties and candidates into consideration. Second, it hypothesizes that wherever ethnicity is politically salient, it matters beyond coethnicity—that is, voters’ decisions are guided by ethnicity even when they are choosing among non-coethnics. Third, it argues that the advantage conferred by ethnicity is mediated by non-ethnic factors. A large vignette experiment carried in 2013 in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh provides strong support for each of these hypotheses. These results imply that the influence of ethnicity on voting behavior may be subtler and more complex than what the main theories of ethnic politics usually assume.